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ABSTRACT

In the digital era, digital literacy is widely acknowledged as an essential skill for graduates of higher education. The skill helps the graduates to cope with the growing competitiveness in the borderless world and is one of the elements necessary for their life-long learning success. Given the growing importance digital literacy and its challenges in higher education, this study aims to understand the state of digital literacy skills of the lecturers and the graduate-level students from the Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University (STOU), Thailand. From the stratified random sampling of 45 graduate-level lecturers and 276 graduate-level students from STOU, we determined their digital literacy skills based on a self-evaluation questionnaire. We applied the digital literacy framework from Eshet-Alkalai for the development of the questionnaire. Reflection on the study indicates that top priorities that we can focus in preparing our students and lecturers in order to place a better value on digital literacy include the reproduction digital skill, especially the ones that is related to copyright awareness, information digital skill and socio-emotional digital skill. The paper concludes with the needs for the development of online and self-guided digital literacy assessment modules.

Keywords: digital literacy, digital skills, digital literacy assessment, self-administered questionnaire

1. BACKGROUND/ OBJECTIVES And GOALS

In the digital era, the proliferation of information technologies and digital contents have significantly impacted most of our daily lives. They pervade almost every aspects of our lives. To name a few, many of us now relies on these digital devices to remind us about daily schedules, to give directions for the quickest route to the destination, to connect with relatives and friends or even to make businesses out of them. The skills required to 'survive' within the digital environment are not only just the ability to use software to perform the required tasks, but also include the ability to assess trustworthy online sources, identify biased web contents, share and integrate digital information, construct new knowledge and communicate with others and etc. (Greene, Yu and Copeland, 2014) (Martin, 2006). These skills are often collectively termed as 'digital literacy' in the literature.

Digital literacy serves as a new 21st-century skill-set. Work by (Osterman, 2012) concluded that a number of important shifts have greatly evolved the definition of digital literacy. One of...

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